What is ‘the rule of law’ and how do we learn about it?

Politicians and journalists constantly refer to “the rule of law” in their commentaries on current events. What exactly is rule of law? Is it the legislation that states, counties, and cities make in their councils? The laws made by Congress and the federal courts? Policy decided by the president, a presidential adviser, a cabinet member, a diplomat or a military commander? Rules parents and teachers set up to guide children’s behavior in homes and schools?

Rule of law is the supremacy of the written constitutional law of a nation over all other laws and codes of behavior enacted across the land. Think about our oaths of office to “preserve, protect and defend” that law.

However, Americans in general, and even our office oath takers, have little idea what that written law says or means any longer, because we no longer teach it to all our citizens in civics classes in schools, colleges and workplaces.

Rule of law is the ultimate “political science” of a nation. In its most basic form, it specifies whether the nation is to be ruled by the well-educated adults of the nation and their elected representatives or by a single clique of rulers or a single individual amassing centralized power.

How do we know what is in America’s constitutional law? Do we listen to our political party leaders or to the courts, or the president, or to business leaders or church leaders?

If these folks knew what the Constitution actually says and means we would not be in the constitutional freefall we are in today.  We have a responsibility to discover its meaning on our own, because what our leaders are telling us about its meaning is very self-serving for them and destructive to us.

We must buy or obtain a free copy of these seven articles of law and read them so we know what each of them says. And then we must set about studying the meaning of those articles by reviewing our own constitutional history — the political twists and turns we have taken throughout our 250-year history.

If we want to do a really good job, we must review one or more of the constitutional histories of ancient democracies like Rome, Athens, the Hebrew Republic, the Anglo-Saxon republic, more modern democratic republics like the German and Dutch federations, and even native continental democracies like our own historical Iroquois Confederation.

Why do we study democracies other than our own? Because there are certain lock-step policies and patterns found in all of them that tell us what was in the minds of our own Founding Fathers and Mothers when they wrote and then ratified our constitutional law starting in 1789. They collectively took the time to study several of the earlier democracies mentioned above to help them carve out the American rule of law.

These seven articles of law are not suggestions, not guidelines, not changeable statutory or judicial law. They are virtually commandments just like the 10 articles or Commandments of the ancient Hebrew republic in the Bible. They are mandates for government organization and operation, and therefore mandates for personal political behavior that must be followed at severe penalty of impeachment and removal from office if they are tampered with.

In summary form, what all those histories tell us is that we must specify term limits on the power given to individuals in government because power corrupts. Those histories say the constitutional law must give supreme power to the legislative body — powers like declaring war, making laws, raising revenue and appropriating/allocating money.

Those powers must not fall into the hands of executive or judicial department officials or police or military authorities of the land. A constitution must make it extremely difficult to change the basic articles for the organization and operation of government. A constitution must allocate the “police powers” to state and local levels of government and reserve only a few reasonable and practical powers to the national government. The “police powers” are the powers that assure activities of institutions, corporations and individuals operate on a humane basis.

Finally, there must be a vigorous system of instruction in law, history, and political science to serve as the basis for the continuation of the long-term constitutional rule of law. There must also be curbs on the extravagant accumulation of wealth by organizations and individuals, because this surely will corrupt the minds and hearts of the citizens of the land as quickly and surely as political power does.

Kimball Shinkoskey
Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of “Democracy and the Ten Commandments” (2016), and “The American Kings” (2014). The first is a constitutional history of an ancient democracy, and the second is a constitutional history of a modern democracy.